TinyCo and 20th Century Fox today announced that "Family Guy" is coming to your phone. The new Family Guy mobile app will feature all of the humor from the show and be completely free to download and play, with premium options to entice your money right out of your wallet.
This will be the first mobile game for the show and TinyCo fought hard for the honor to design it, besting over a dozen other developers for the license. TinyCo has quite the stable of popular games already, both with the card game Spellstorm and the Tiny series (Tiny Castle, Tiny Monster, Tiny Village, etc.), but this is their first big licensed deal. It's certainly a huge one for them and they've spent the last year designing it and getting ready for this big responsibility, using a team that's twice as large as they're used to. TinyCo's games have been downloaded more than 85 million times and in September they got a bit of lucky press when John McCain was caught playing their game VIP Poker instead of paying attention to the Senate hearings on Syria, so there's good proof of their game's addictive nature.
But there's definitely pressure for them to succeed. "Family Guy" is over a decade old at this point and while debates over the quality of the show can certainly be made it's still quite popular, and Fox has already had some incredible success in the mobile game business. Most notable is their other free-to-play title The Simpsons: Tapped Out (designed by Gameloft), which consistently is one of the top-grossing apps on the iOS marketplace. It seems fair to think that the Family Guy will function in a similar manner, with tons of updates and tie-ins to the weekly shows to remind people that there was a once-funny tv show of the same name.
The game will feature a completely original story and the goal is that it will launch with month's worth of content and continue to push out new content for years. TinyCo has comedy writers on staff to ensure that it's consistently funny and topical. "If Miley Cyrus does something crazy this week, we can make fun of that in the game a day later," vice president of mobile at Fox Digital Entertainment Matt McMahon told VentureBeat. "We'll do content updates every four to five weeks. We'll do more than seasonal content packs for Thanksgiving or Christmas. We're excited about the ongoing operations for the game."
"Family Guy" star Peter Griffin, said, "It's really fun. Plus, if you play it for more than three hours, it counts as going outside!"
No word on if the currently-deceased Brian will make an appearance, but how could he not?
Expect Family Guy to debut sometime next year for both iOS and Android.
